Archive for category Published elsewhere

Here’s something I wrote for the work blog. It’s a bit derivative – but not much to say as yet that’s not already been said.

We have just, as the veteran broadcaster Jon Snow remarked on Friday, witnessed ‘one of the most remarkable election results in modern British history’ – and it is a result, moreover that has fundamentally shifted the basic coordinates of politics in Britain. Political ‘business as usual’ as we have known it for the past few decades is, quite simply, over.

Though the Tories won the greatest share of the vote and the most seats – and thus ‘won’ the election in the sense that they have been (only just…) returned to government – it is apparent to everyone that this election result was, for them, an utter catastrophe. The gamble on which May staked everything was to call a snap election in order to capitalise on an apparent post-referendum swing to the right in UK politics and thus solidify her leadership going into the Brexit negotiations with a large parliamentary majority. To say that May’s wager didn’t pay off would be an understatement – May miscalculated disastrously, leaving her authority severely and perhaps fatally weakened. Indeed the process that has seen her rapidly transformed from the ‘strong and stable’ darling of much of the media punditocracy to the pathetically diminished figure we see now scrabbling for a parliamentary alliance with the sectarian, homophobic reactionaries of the DUP in order to shore up her crumbling position has to be one of the most stunning reversals of fortune in post-war British political history.

May is now, as George Osborne remarked with brutal accuracy in a TV interview, a ‘dead woman walking’, deeply despised and increasingly isolated within her own party. However it’s probably unlikely that there’ll be a leadership challenge any time soon if only because most Tories fear triggering another general election which would almost certainly put Corbyn in 10 Downing Street.

That Labour should now be within striking distance of government power is surely the most remarkable dimension of the political earthquake we have just experienced. Just a few short weeks ago Labour was 20 points behind in the polls, and Corbyn’s personal ratings were recorded at a dismal minus 23 points (in comparison with May’s plus 28). The conventional wisdom across almost the entirety of the media and political class was that Labour was heading toward humiliating defeat and possible oblivion. Indeed, right up until the exit poll was released on Thursday night few even among Corbyn’s supporters really believed that the party could hope realistically for much more than survival as a major political force.

Given this, the party’s electoral performance was astonishing. Labour enjoyed its biggest surge in vote share since 1945, – up by almost 10% compared with 2015 to 40% of the total vote, winning nearly 13 million votes and increasing its number of seats by 30. This result is all the more incredible when you consider that over the past two years Corbyn has faced a relentless campaign of open hostility and sabotage from within the Parliamentary Labour Party and several attempts to oust him from the leadership. What is more he was subjected to a barrage of daily vilification from large swathes of the media over the same period – and not just from the traditionally Tory press. Most columnists for the generally Labour supporting Guardian, for example, have displayed little but contempt – or at best condescension – toward Corbyn and his supporters since he first won the leadership.

So how did Corbyn’s Labour do it?

Part of the explanation lies in the complete ineptitude of the Tory election campaign. There was of course, the debacle of the so called ‘dementia tax’, and the revelation, on the campaign trail, of May’s robotic awkwardness and inability to connect emotionally with ordinary people. Her failure to attend the BBC leaders’ debate – looking for all the world like someone scared of debating directly with her political opponents – might well have been a turning point in terms of her personal rating with the electorate. However, the atrocious Tory campaign cannot, in itself, explain Corbyn’s success. For that we need to look at the Corbyn team’s strategy and the way his campaign resonated with large numbers of people.

Corbyn’s campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party rested from the start on the idea that the party’s fortunes could be revived by attracting lost voters and those who felt alienated by the prevailing political landscape. That is, he argued that the party should reject the Blairite machine-politics of ‘triangulation’ that focused on competition for a relatively small number of ‘centre-ground’ ‘floating voters’, and concentrate, instead on tapping a deep well of relatively disenfranchised voters including, crucially, the young (who tend not to turnout in large numbers during elections). This was to be done, in large part, by campaigning on distinctive left social democratic policies – putting clear red water between Labour and the other parties – and, just as importantly, by transforming the party into something like a party/social movement hybrid that sought to mobilise its members into a grassroots mass campaigning force. This leadership pitch was extraordinarily successful in catapulting Corbyn to the leadership and in galvanizing an active and mobilised base of support among the party membership to defend him from the various ‘coup’ attempts set in motion by the party’s right wing establishment. But while this had worked well within the party among a relatively small number of people, it was not clear that the same approach could be successful beyond the party itself among the electorate as a whole at the level of a general election.

Confounding all of his critics, Corbyn and his team proved beyond doubt on June 8th that this approach could indeed work at a national level. The turning point in Labour’s election campaign was clearly the release of the party’s manifesto – a bold document full of public spending, redistributionist and growth-centred social democratic policies that broke with the politics and economics of austerity. The manifesto seems to have resonated deeply with wide sections of the electorate sick of many years of cuts to public services, stagnating wages and rising inequality. The Corbyn team’s gamble was that a relatively left-wing manifesto (by recent standards) would tap hidden but deep reserves of support among swathes of voters for the sort of policies that previous Labour leaderships had abandoned in their efforts to ‘triangulate’ and chase the ‘centre ground’. It paid off.

The early leak of the manifesto – whether this was deliberate or not (there is some suggestion that a pro-Corbyn source ‘leaked’ it to ensure that the manifesto pledges couldn’t be watered down by the Labour right) – also ensured that Labour was able to shape the agenda for the election campaign. Labour refused to concentrate their fight on the terrain preferred by the Tories – the issue of Brexit – steering the debate toward issues of inequality, public spending, healthcare and education. Though Corbyn was taxed initially by pro-Remain forces within Labour for his apparent fudging on Brexit, this manoeuvre appears, in retrospect, to have allowed Corbyn to side-step and close down an issue that threated to divide the Labour camp. Indeed psephological analysis of the vote indicates that Labour managed to hold on to (usually older) Leave voters in sufficient numbers while cohering the lion’s share of votes from those who supported Remain.

The turning point in Labour’s fortunes – the release of the manifesto – coincided with the period when broadcast media election rules kicked in. As Corbyn’s close ally John McDonnell has pointed out the more balanced broadcast coverage that this ensured enabled many people to see, for the first time, Corbyn for the ‘honest, decent, principled and indeed strong leader he was’. Seeing Corbyn speak directly and relatively unfiltered by media hostility and bias, people generally liked what they saw – especially in comparison with May’s wooden and uncharismatic performances. The Ashcroft poll indicates that it was indeed in this period in the final weeks before the ballot that Labour won people over in large numbers – 57% of those who voted Labour made their decision in the last month before the election.

The most striking thing about the voting figures, however, is the way in which young voters turned out for Labour – 67% of 18-24 year old voters (and well over half of 25-34 year olds) chose Labour. Various reports have suggested, moreover, that turnout amongst the youth vote surged to an impressive 72% – vindicating Corbyn’s decision to orient his campaign toward the young and those who do not normally choose to vote. This high turnout for Labour was almost certainly driven, to a significant extent, by the way in which the Corbyn campaign managed to mobilise active support among young people. It was for the most part, young people who joined the Momentum canvassing teams that flocked to Labour marginals and populated Momentum’s phone banking efforts. Further, it seems clear that a largely spontaneous pro-Corbyn campaign of video, meme and joke sharing (replete with its own tongue-in-cheek idiom – ‘Arm John McDonnell!’, ‘Corbyn is the absolute boy!’) emerged among the young on social media – Twitter especially – largely under the radar of established media commentators. Thus the youth turnout for Labour may well have been driven in significant part by an organic peer-to-peer social media effort that simply bypassed traditional forms of media that were largely hostile to Corbyn.

These factors cohered to produce what is surely one of the biggest political upsets in Britain in living memory. Corbyn has been transformed in a matter of days, from an utter outsider – largely derided in mainstream political discourse – to a Prime Minister in waiting. It’s worth pointing out, furthermore, that it is not just the Tories who look now like a spent and largely defeated force. Corbyn’s success was also a defeat for the Murdoch press and tabloid media who threw everything at Corbyn during the campaign with little apparent effect. The days when Labour politicians used to feel they had to bow and scrape before the right wing press are now over. It was also a humiliating defeat for the ‘centrist’ punditocracy that dominate the broadsheet and broadcast media in whose conventional wisdom – right up until the exit poll – Corbyn was leading the Labour party into oblivion. They look rather silly now. Most of all, perhaps, Corbyn’s electoral success was a devastating blow to his enemies within the Parliamentary Labour Party. Indeed, one thing is for sure – New Labour and the Blairite faction in the party are now truly dead and buried as a serious political force.

What all of these defeated groups shared in common were what we might call neoliberal assumptions – or assumptions characteristic of the neoliberal era in British politics. They simply took it for granted, that is, that you cannot succeed electorally on a left-wing manifesto, that voters are motivated more by fear and self-interest than they are by appeals to community and the public good, that they prefer ‘belt-tightening’ and privatisation to expanded investment in public services and above all that people have fully and irreversibly internalised the idea that ‘there is no alternative’ to the ‘free market’-driven order. With Corbyn’s near victory confounding these assumptions, British social democracy has roared back into life after many years of dormancy and with it an ideological space has opened up, shifting the horizons of the possible, allowing us once again to envisage and work confidently toward a kinder, more equal and more humane social order.

There’s a whole series of interesting articles and interviews on the EU referendum on Jacobin – includes contributions from Richard Seymour, Neil Davidson and David Renton. The series includes my article ‘There is No Left Exit’

It would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, but a party of the radical left is on the cusp of power in an EU country. The latest opinion polls indicate that Syriza will triumph in the Greek national elections to be held on Sunday and although it may not win an absolute majority in parliament it would (assuming it can find coalition partners) certainly be the dominant force in any coalition government that emerged.

Unsurprisingly the imminent prospect of a left government committed to breaking with the brutal reign of austerity has alarmed the powerful within and beyond Greece. In a thinly veiled attack on Syriza, for example, the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, recently warned Greeks about electing ‘extreme forces’ into power and suggested, rather in the manner of a threat, that they ought to consider ‘what a wrong election result would mean for Greece and the eurozone’.

But what’s remarkable about this is that, for all the warnings of ‘extremism’, Syriza’s demands are in fact rather modest and indeed eminently sensible. At the core of its programme are pledges to negotiate the cancellation of 50 percent of Greece’s crippling debt, lift austerity and boost growth and employment through public investment. These proposals are accompanied by a range of measures designed to address what Syriza rightly calls the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Greece such as promises to provide free electricity and subsidised meals and housing for the poor.

Given the economic and social catastrophe that austerity has visited on Greece—over 25 percent unemployment, an economy that has contracted by a quarter, wages and pensions slashed, soaring rates of homelessness, suicide and infant mortality—these are hardly outlandish or utopian proposals. They pivot on the simple, obvious truths that the national debt is unpayable, that austerity is generating nothing but misery and, further, on the rather basic ethical demand that every citizen should have enough to eat, decent housing and access to the basic resources that will allow them to live with dignity. There is nothing extreme about this—indeed, surely the real extremists are those who insist on further austerity, further hardship and humiliation for ordinary Greeks.

It is precisely the moderation of Syriza’s stance, however, that has attracted fierce criticism from other left wing groups. The Greek Communist Party (KKE) for example denounces Syriza for ‘opportunism’ while the Front of the Greek Anticapitalist Left(Antarsya), though much less sectarian than the KKE, refuses to combine forces with Syriza, arguing that the latter’s programme is insufficiently radical. Internationally too, there’s no shortage of left critics issuing dire warnings in relation to Syriza’s ‘reformism’, convinced that all it aspires to do is to manage, rather than seriously challenge, the system. Even among many of its supporters there is a general consensus that Syriza ‘is not as radical as we would want’ and that backing it in the forthcoming election represents a necessary reining in of the left’s political ambitions under current conditions.

These criticisms are mistaken, however, for three closely related reasons.

Firstly, it is not at all clear what serious alternative most of these critics propose. In fact, for many of them the underlying dispute with Syriza is not so much over the details of reform proposals as it is with the party’s very intention to form a government within the political institutions of the capitalist state. Such a strategy, they warn, leads inexorably to betrayal since any party that seeks to utilise capitalist institutions will become trapped within the logic of the system. But years of intense social struggles in Greece—including mass demonstrations, occupations of government buildings and more than 30 general strikes—have failed to stop austerity, much less usher in socialist transformation. It is clear that social mobilisation in itself is not enough and that the question of political power must be confronted. Greek workers require a political instrument to lead in actually implementing their demands.

In this regard many of Syriza’s Marxist critics invoke the need for soviet organs of workers’ power. The obvious problem here, however, is that in circumstances where such organs show little sign of emerging even after years of intense social struggle such invocation remains entirely abstract—it is, for the time being at least, wishful thinking rather than the identification of a serious, concrete alternative in the here and now. Indeed, typically, such critics cannot specify in anything but the most hand-waving and vague terms how such organs of workers’ power might possibly emerge. Syriza, however, grasps that the struggle as it currently is requires a government of the left that utilises existing political institutions and, for all the undoubted risks, problems and dilemmas that this will bring, are prepared to take on this responsibility. As such, only Syriza proposes a serious and concrete plan to confront the urgency of the situation in Greece. In comparison, many of its leftwing critics seem to me to offer little but evasive posturing which of course offers little of practical value to people currently struggling to feed their families and pay their rent—this, indeed, is one reason why the KKE and Antarsya will struggle to win more than derisory shares of the vote in the forthcoming election.

Secondly, Syriza’s proposed reforms correspond to the immediate needs and demands of ordinary Greeks—for jobs, better wages, affordable food and housing and so on. Indeed it’s precisely because of this correspondence that Syriza’s programme has resonated so successfully with Greek voters, bringing the party to the brink of office and thus putting imminent, real change on the agenda in a way that ostensibly ‘radical’ but wholly abstract revolutionary demands with little political traction never could.

Thirdly, it’s clear that, for all its sober pragmatism, Syriza’s manifesto is likely to bring it into direct confrontation with the forces of domestic and international capital. It’s certainly not a programme for the management of capitalism on capital’s terms. A Syriza government is likely to face intense hostility in the form, for example, of serious capital flight, bank runs, an ‘investment strike’ and threats of withdrawal on the part of multinationals together with various methods of blackmail and obstruction on the part of the EU. It will also face a dangerous struggle within the Greek state itself—not least in relation to an unreliable and hostile police force in which more than half of all officers voted for the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in the 2012 national elections.

It’s likely, then, that on taking office Syriza will, very quickly, be faced with a stark choice: either to renege on its commitments in the face of powerful opposition or to press ahead, which will mean being prepared to take counter-measures to defend its initial reforms: cancellation of the debt, nationalising banks, expropriating closed factories. Of course there’s nothing inevitable about which of these two options Syriza will choose, but given the popular hopes generated by its promises, to retreat on its core commitments would certainly be to consign itself to future electoral oblivion. Much here would depend on mobilised mass support seeking to push the government on and to force it to stick to its promises—indeed a Syriza victory on Sunday will probably unleash a new wave of popular struggles.

The key point here is that determined, consistent implementation and defence of Syriza’s pragmatic election promises is likely to lead to measures that go far beyond the party’s current objectives. We could say that Syriza’s apparently modest programme conceals an inner dynamic of radicalisation.

The very possibility of this dynamic however is rooted in the moderation of the initial demands—in the way in which these articulate the everyday concerns of the mass of the Greek population. What anti-capitalist forces operating within Syriza grasp is that revolutionary social change must emerge from ordinary people’s collective experience of the way in which modest, common sense measures to improve their lives and defend their dignity run up against the limits of what the current order will allow. This experience thus reveals the system’s essential inhumanity—in a sense we might say its extremism—and demonstrates concretely, in a way that abstract declarations of ‘the need for socialism’ simply do not, the imperative to push beyond capitalist limits in order to secure the very basic conditions for a decent and humane society.

Ed Rooksbyteaches politics at Ruskin College in Oxford and is a member of Left Unity.

Radical left parties such as Syriza in Greece and the Front De Gauche in France have made significant gains recently. But what about Britain? Socialist film maker Ken Loach has recent issued a call for a new left party to be formed here too. Ed Rooksby, one of the supporters of the call, explains why he thinks the time is right to launch such a party and what its aims should be. Socialist Review will respond in our next issue.

Radical left parties committed to fighting austerity and able to attract considerable popular support have emerged across Europe – most spectacularly in Greece. We are in desperate need of a similar party in Britain – one which is willing to take the risk of seeking to break the stranglehold of a social democracy that has long since capitulated to neoliberalism and present an unashamedly socialist alternative. Thankfully, for the first time in a long period, the conditions for the emergence of a broad left coalition of forces in the UK capable of attracting large-scale support seem ripe. These conditions have been generated and shaped by four major interconnected political and economic developments.

The first and most obvious of these is economic crisis and austerity. This has posed, in very immediate terms, the question of how best to defend jobs, living conditions and the healthcare, education and welfare reforms won in struggle decades ago, and which are now being stripped back in a determined assault. But it has also posed the question, again in immediate terms, of whether or not capitalism is in fact compatible, over any prolonged and sustained period, with decent welfare provision and conditions of life and work for the majority. For those who conclude that it is not, the further problem of how to build a more democratic and humane alternative is raised. The crisis and austerity confront us with fundamental and pressing questions in relation to organisation and strategy. It is in this context that the idea of the construction of a new organisation of the left has been put firmly on the political agenda.

The second development – one closely meshed with the first – is that it has become painfully apparent to many of the Labour Party’s erstwhile supporters and activists that Labour is not an effective political vehicle for the organisation of resistance to austerity (let alone for the implementation of a counter-offensive against capital). There has, over the past few weeks and months, been a pronounced acceleration of a longer-term process of disillusionment on the part of Labour’s core supporters and activist base and, correspondingly, a growing willingness among many of them to countenance the prospect of leaving Labour to join a new organisation – in particular, the Left Unity initiative associated with Ken Loach’s recent appeal.

Rise of Syriza

The third factor shaping this new conjuncture in the UK is an external one – the international influence and prestige of Syriza. The Syriza phenomenon has demonstrated that it is possible for a coalition of fairly disparate left forces to win mass support with a clear anti-austerity agenda and win such support very rapidly. More than this, Syriza has shown that it is possible for the radical left to challenge seriously for power. The morale-raising psychological impact of this on socialists across Europe should not be underestimated. This Syriza effect interacts with the loosening of Labour’s political hegemony – further contributing to the sense that it is possible to build an effective political force to the left of Labour. It has also created a renewed sense of possibility among more radical left groupings.

There is a fourth development which closely interacts with the third. This is the recent bust-up in the SWP. Whatever you think of it, this has clearly shaken up the political landscape on the left and opened up a new space for realignment. In interaction with the Syriza effect, this has created a very promising situation for building a new, broad coalition.

These are the main developments that together constitute a new conjuncture on the UK left in which a significant realignment of forces has become a definite and realistic possibility. The most exciting and promising development in this respect is the emergence of the Left Unity organisation which sees itself as the embryonic form of a new broad-church party of the left and which models itself in relation to Syriza and other successful groupings such as the Front de Gauche.

The classic strategic dilemma

One of the biggest questions that the conjuncture poses for us is the question of strategic orientation and the associated issue of the organisational form that a new coordination of forces should take.

Of course, here we start to encroach on one of the oldest controversies in socialist thought – the classic reform/revolution debate. Let me draw out (in what cannot be anything other than a very simplified way given constraints of space) the core problems with each of these approaches as they are usually conceived in order to provide the foundations for a different way of approaching the question of socialist strategy.

At the heart of the reformist approach is the idea that the process of transition to socialism can be a wholly evolutionary one of smooth, piecemeal change. The core problem (among many) with this strategy is that, when reformists find themselves in power, they also find themselves responsible for the management of a capitalist economy. Since radical measures aimed at the introduction of socialism must, by definition, endanger capitalist profit, reformist governments find themselves caught on the horns of an impossible dilemma; they require capitalist cooperation for a process of gradual transition to socialism, and yet the introduction of any measure which might lead very far in the direction of socialism would necessarily lose them the cooperation (and earn them the intense hostility) of capital. So, in opposition to reformism, it must be insisted that the transition to socialism cannot be a wholly gradual process but must involve some kind of revolutionary break.

The revolutionary socialist approach avoids the core problem of reformism but, as it is traditionally conceived, has its own particular deficiencies. Again, I cannot outline all of these here, so will focus on the main difficulty.

In one important sense at least there is no absolute dividing line between a strategy of reform and traditional revolutionary socialism. Most revolutionaries believe that the struggle for and winning of reforms increases the democratic capacities of the working class, raises its confidence and educates it politically. Furthermore, many revolutionaries (see, for example, Alex Callinicos’s An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto) appear to believe that revolution is most likely to emerge out of a (frustrated) movement for reform which probes the limits of what the capitalist state is willing to concede and which spills over into something more far-reaching – and so, to this end, the strategy is to seek to place demands on the state which can tip the balance of power in favour of the working class and popular forces.

The defining feature of revolutionary socialism as it is usually conceived, however, is the view that socialists must remain strictly independent of the capitalist state rather than seek to work within it. This, however, is where the strategy runs into a major problem. The first part of this problem is that, in countries such as Britain, with a long established tradition of liberal democracy and, indeed, a long established tradition of reformism, it is difficult to imagine a process of mass radicalisation in anything other than the electoral rise of a party seeking to form a radical government. That is, it is hard to see this process throwing up anything other than a movement committed to the formation of a “workers’ government”. This, indeed, is the way things appear to be working out in Greece.

The second part of this problem is that it is also hard to see how the sort of transitional reforms revolutionaries want to pressure the state to enact would be implemented by government representatives reluctant to do so, let alone deeply opposed to them politically and ideologically. Some concessions could be wrested from a pro-capitalist government, yes – but a whole series of radical reforms that seriously undermine the power of capital? It seems unlikely. The major difficulty in the traditional revolutionary approach, then, is in its rejection of the very idea of taking power within the political structures of capitalism.

The dialectic of change

So neither the traditional reformist approach nor the traditional revolutionary strategy seems adequate. We need, instead, a strategy that seeks to combine elements of both. In his book The Dialectic of Change the Russian theorist Boris Kagarlitsky seeks to elaborate just such an approach. Revolutionary transformation, he argues, can only emerge organically and dialectically from a process of radical reform set in motion by a socialist government. He calls this approach “revolutionary reformism”.

In Kagarlitsky’s view it is only when you grasp the idea that reform and revolution augment and condition each other that you can start to formulate a realistic strategy of socialist change. Kagarlitsky suggests that revolution should be “conceived as a definite and necessary stage, a qualitative leap, in the process of reform” – “revolution is a ‘break in gradualness’, a leap in development”. It is a stage of development which is necessary for the consolidation of the changes – new socialist social relations – which can be brought into being (in some embryonic sense at least) within capitalist society through reform.

Clearly, not all reforms intertwine organically with revolutionary change. Kagarlitsky’s favoured strategy of reform is based on a passage from The Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels write of the implementation of a series of reforms which may “appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production”.

Marx and Engels indicate that the introduction of reforms which run counter to the logic of capitalism (and which therefore appear in themselves “economically insufficient and untenable”) may set in motion a dynamic of cumulative change – a kind of chain reaction. That is, these initial reforms destabilise capitalism and therefore necessitate the implementation of further reforms which themselves run counter to capitalist logic and, in turn, stimulate further changes and so on. It is in this sense that these reforms “outstrip themselves” – they unleash a process of change which goes much further than the initial effects of the primary reforms themselves. Kagarlitsky believes that the dynamic of cumulative change Marx and Engels sketch out here provides the basis for a strategy of radical reform today.

How could such a process be set in motion? It is the manner in which reforms are implemented that is the crucial factor. Firstly, Kagarlitsky suggests that each reform must be designed to stimulate further reforms which flow from it organically. This demands that each reform is integrated into a well-planned strategic programme. Secondly, he stresses that these reforms must be driven forward by a movement which unites mass mobilisation “from below” with pressure “from above” as revolutionary reformist politicians work within state institutions. Revolutionary reformists within state institutions must be subjected to constant pressure from below. There must be a mass movement outside these institutions, capable of controlling their representatives and forcing them on to implement the reforms they have promised.

Furthermore, “revolutionary reforms” must be designed to strengthen and empower this movement. The growth of popular power would develop the organisational capacity of the mass movement and this would open up opportunities for the further flowering of popular democracy. In this way it can be seen that the dialectic between mass movement and socialist representatives in office would contribute to the momentum of the revolutionary reformist dynamic of cumulative change. Socialist representatives are driven on to introduce reforms which deepen mass democracy which, in turn, encourages the mass movement to pressure leaders for still further changes and so on.

Transitional Programme

What reforms, more concretely, might such a transitional programme include? A few ideas can be suggested. It might begin in its initial stage with an ambitious programme of directed investment. Spending should be strategically targeted and designed to kickstart more sustainable growth, create jobs and reorient the economy away from its reliance on the financial sector. Priority areas for investment could include investment in green, low-carbon infrastructure – particularly in transport and energy.

Radicalisation of the process of reform might throw up further measures including nationalisation of major financial institutions under democratic control and the bringing into public ownership, of a string of industrial firms. Taking a large proportion of the financial sector into public ownership would enable financial resources to be allocated according to social and environmental criteria. Similarly, the nationalisation of industrial firms would allow their activities to be oriented increasingly towards socially useful and environmentally sustainable production. Radical forms of democratic planning could be explored within nationalised firms. Of course, democratic planning and control should not be confined to the narrowly “economic” sector. The entirety of the public sector – the education system, welfare system, NHS and so on – should be opened up to collective, democratic and participatory forms of management.

Of course, it is worth pointing out that such a strategy would depend for its success on the existence of allies implementing similar processes of transformation abroad. Certainly any country attempting to go it alone would- at least beyond a certain point – find itself hopelessly isolated in the face of hugely powerful international economic and political forces. But as we’ve seen with the “Syriza effect” – the process in which the rise of the radical left in Greece has kickstarted moves towards political realignment elsewhere – the emergence of a radical left government in one part of the world is likely to provide a boost to similar movements elsewhere.

Of course, this sort of strategy raises its own problems. Such a left government would certainly arouse the intense hostility of capital and would come under huge pressure to reverse its programme from day one. This pressure would only increase as the dynamic of any transitional programme gathered momentum – if, indeed, it did. But the argument I have developed above suggests that there does not seem to be any plausible alternative strategic approach. It is hard to see how the left in Europe can avoid the problem of taking power in a left government if it is serious about changing society.

Mark L Thomas’ response in the June issue of Socialist Review can be read here.